Articles Containing ‘Drip Tape’

A standard hay baler can compress plastic used for growing vegetables into a 4-feet by 5-feet ball, saving growers money in labor and disposal costs.

Ron Goldy, Michigan State University Southwest district vegetable agent, piqued the interest of growers after he showed them baling techniques at six different farms in Southwest Michigan including a demonstration on Sept, 20.

When it comes time to discard the plastic, vegetable growers who use plastic face disposal costs of $300-$350 per large construction bin. Goldy said 270 pounds of plastic are used per acre. With 3,000 acres of plastic used in Michigan that’s 810,000 pounds of plastic. Typically a grower piles up the plastic and loads it onto a construction bin before it is taken to a landfill. With the baler growers can compress four to five acres of plastic into a bale that they can lift with a forklift.

The evolution of drip tape materials, drip tape emitter pathways, and hardware to connect, install, and remove/retrieve drip tape has been nothing short of phenomenal since the early drip tape days of the 1970’s. Drip tape has been successfully used on millions of acres of cropland, often with exceptional savings in water and improvements in crop quality and yields.

A major advantage of using tape materials, as compared to harder wall hose and emitters, is a low price per foot. But this tremendous advantage brings with it a higher sensitivity to physical damage. Precautions must also be taken to minimize problems with plugging the relatively small flow passageways of the emitters. This is not to say that problems will unavoidably occur with drip tape – but problems have occurred and they are often misunderstood or misdiagnosed.